A Predator, Raised
by Spike Daft
Summary: COMPLETELY REWRITTEN. The actual origin story I am creating for Fish Mooney and Oswald Cobblepot. Things are violent; there are unpleasant images. Feedback is forever and ever appreciated. Please enjoy.


_Cobblepot listens to Nine Inch Nails and the Smiths. And possibly Skinny Puppy. End of story. Er…not this story. This one is just beginning. Sorry; I'm drunk._

_-S.D._

_"Head like a hole/ black out your soul/ I'd rather die/ Than give you control"_

Oswald Cobblepot approached the entrance of Fish Mooney's club with the most courage, hopefulness, and daring that he had ever mustered for himself in his entire life (or as far back as he could remember). Many things were riding on this new opportunity. He had been doing the dirty work, for dirty men, for far too long. This was his time, now, at the age of twenty-four; it was time for life he deserved to undergo its transformation. He wanted to rise up; to take control, but he was a reasonable young man when he was feeling his best and knew that he was in store for a long journey.

Which started here, at the glass doors of the club with the red neon fish skeleton bedecked upon the establishment's front. No other sign or picture decorated the darkly tinted fronts of glass; the club didn't need to advertise a name. This club, this _place of business_, need not advertise to lure in customers. Its patrons were long haunts; loyal businessmen and women; regular customers who paid very good money to relax in a place that never noted names and never judged characters. They paid good money to feel safe in a place where they would engage in business transactions; a bastion of safety when bribes were to be paid or assassins hired. A place whose ability to leave things to die in its depths would have made Las Vegas envious.

Oswald knew this place well, though he had never the monetary extravagance to socialize here, even if he had the time and wish to do so. Everything in his life was business. He was especially accustomed to the back alley, where he and those he worked for or with carried out the necessary actions that businesses such as theirs required. He found great glee in meeting unfortunate men in that alley.

Oswald stood for a moment, thinking, before he took a breath; shifted his feet, tugged fussily at his tie; it was the best he could afford for Fish Mooney's company. He wouldn't eat for a week, but he needed the suit more. Hopefully, he would become familiar with the other exits and entrances of this place; hopefully, he would come to see it as a familiar home. And, hopefully, with this new possibility in his life, he would never again have to choose between eating and proper clothing.

He raised a pale, long-fingered hand to knock at the front entrance, and was suddenly blindingly aware of the dark purple half-moons at the bases of his short, obsessively-trimmed fingernails. Signs that, as his mother and doctors insisted in his youth, hinted at a terrible, fragile illness which they could never seem to indentify, no matter the horrific tests he endured. Perhaps it was; he was aware that he had always been painfully thin and sickly. Suddenly, as it was wont to do more often as he got older, the past washed over him and he found himself in a reverie of memories of his childhood.

As mentioned, he was thin and sickly. There was no denying that; he had always been so. He was the only child of a wealthy and influential woman in Latvia by the name of Gertrude Kapelput, a woman born into wealth and aristocracy, who lost her lord before their firstborn son arrived, though no one—not even Oswald himself—knew what had happened to the man. Some people in the towns believed that she had killed him and used her power to find someone to dispose of him in such a way that he would never be found again, merely to inherit the name of the opulent stables he owned. She named her first born son Oswald after her beloved brother, who had been stricken with a strange, seemingly spreading plague and had perished in a most untimely manner while she and her only sibling were just children. The people in the towns and farms bespoke of rumors which were common; when people whispered about their patriarchy there was rarely praise or reverence. The country was poor; the rich living incredibly opulent lives while the citizens they deigned to be their countrymen over a spot of tea lived in ragged plank and mud shelters, ate flyblown meat unfit for dogs, and trod farm animal dung underfoot perpetually as though it were the carpet God deemed to be the only substrate available to their misfortunate lot.

Oswald Kapelput was born early; nearly died. His mother worshipped him from the day he was born; something she herself had created without the help of aristocracy or privilege. A creature that would be loyal to her, and never leave her alone to long for company whilst dressed in the finest silks and velvets. But her money soon ran out, and she found herself somgst the commoners, and felt that she could not go out lest she be spat upon by those who had once sat in their dark dwellings and envied her.

Despite the fall from familial grace, as Oswald grew, his mother became utterly stricken with the child's beauty and even temperance. But the boy was plagued by doctors on a distressingly consistent basis; necessary, yes, but not welcomed. He was ill more often than not, suffering conditions of the lungs and thin, brittle bones that broke easily and were not easily repaired. The boy was meant for a life of gentle pursuits, they said, and they reiterated; no physical suffering, no physical play, no physical love. Safely warned away from easily-made bruises on porcelain skin or the snap of a birdlike bone. The boy was, at the very least, untouchable. Oswald had felt, in his youth, that the very untouchable status that he was praised for as a lord (only by his mother, of course) was nothing but its own dark and lonely hell. Soon, he began to despise the company of other children. After that, he began to despise the concept of God.

He wasn't really religious; had never been, despite his mother's devoutness. God knew that those who took interest in his upbringing (namely the Church, who happily forced their commandments on destitute, lost young women like his mother), were getting nowhere with prayer and payment. Oswald thought the concept of God to be a masterfully crafted, manipulative joke that poor saps like his fearful, weak, and perpetually lonesome mother would embrace with the fervor of the dying, and would suffer it thus as her burden until death claimed her; and never in the way in which the Lord's disciples prayed for nor assured themselves that they would, so pious and gripping were they to His word.

No: death took these disciples, though fortunately not Oswald's mother, in horrific, convulsing, putrescent ways. It was the same plague that had taken Gertrude's brother; grown strong and proliferent by this time, ground deep into the very soil of Latvia. It left people rotting along with the bodies of their children; and those who survived yet sometimes feasted upon their honored elders to live a day or two more, at best. But that was the hell of it. They consumed the flesh of their dead parents, brothers, sisters out of sheer desperation to survive their hunger. They ate the sickness. They became a plague themselves, and died with full bellies but rotting, decaying, liquefying hearts; mouths agape in a last agony, bellies burst with insects and fed upon by rats.

The plague that had swept Oswald's small country had been hidden from the New World, with no idea explanation ever given. He knew that God did not exist. He knew it when he took his first human life, a boy aged six; only a year older then Oswald himself. The Latvian child, like Oswald and raised also with his single mother, had prayed to God with the fervor of one possessed as Oswald stood above him, eyes flashing a sapphire emptiness that would be most present in later years. The boy had called Oswald a name in the schoolyard; _neuzticams briesmonis_; a faithless monster. The boy already bled from several stab wounds at this point; Oswald had stricken and pursued, stricken and pursued. The boy now was ready to be left for dead in the woods of Eastern Europe. He said the Lord's Prayer in Latvian, again and again, until Oswald was so angry with his ignorance that he slashed the knife he had stolen from his mother's kitchen across the boy's neck, as he had seen his mother do with the roosters. Anger gave strength to his bird-fragile limbs, as did frustration and giddy fear, and it gave him such a force of being, as though commanded by demons, that the praying child was nearly decapitated by the time Oswald thought it reasonable enough to relent, and a semblance of life returned to his eyes.

Oswald snapped out of his daze, freshly made aware of these things now, but knowing the beatings he had endured in the past (and present) and survived, he felt the illness theory all to be complete and utter horseshit, as he had so far lived, and presently tried to smile to encourage himself. He had lived this long. Even, in a life of experiences of the least pride fathomable, he was alive. And more so, he was able to support his aging mother. He had been a Good Boy, as he was always told to be by the Church and his mother and her occasional male counterparts.

He tried hard to be a Good Boy. Sometimes the darkness, though, was just a bit too much. It had always existed, from the very first day he could remember, festering and roiling in a slumbering volcano deep within himself. But by God, he hid it well.

In a rush, as he did most of his thinking these days, he decided against knocking and eventually entered the establishment. There were female dancers there, of which he had been accustomed to in his latest line of work. They, of course, paid their entire heed to the patrons; mostly Japanese businessmen and mafia stoolies that always had spare dollars to stuff wherever they were permitted to, leaving behind trophy wives who convinced themselves that their husbands were out being saints. Oswald suppressed a sneer and turned to the man who attended the bar, evidently alone, attractive in his own way and yet of the undeserving type that Oswald had come to disdain in this flourishing, dime-a-dozen business.

Nevertheless, Oswald wore his mask well.

"E-excuse me, sir?", he ventured, wringing his hands nervously.

The man looked up, wiping a glass, and thrust his chin in response.

"I'm looking for Miss Fish Mooney," Oswald practically stammered. "I- we have an appointment. Three o' clock. Could you direct me to her, if you would be so kind?"

"You Cobblepot?" the man asked, somewhat incredulous. Oswald nervously nodded and smiled, guessing and hoping that his unflappable charm would do its magic.

It worked. The man gestured and went round from behind the bar. Oswald followed until the man stopped at a closed door to the end of the hall and said, "Miss Mooney is in there. I'd knock if I were you."

"Of course," Oswald placated. "Thank you for your assistance."

The man ignored him and went back down the hall to the bar he attended, which seemed to have little patrons at three 'o clock in the afternoon.

That was just fine for Oswald.

He tapped upon Mooney's office door as he traditionally knocked during business transactions; three solid raps. Serious enough to convey importance, but nothing dramatic or demanding. Immediately, a smooth woman's voice from within bid him enter.

He did so, thankfully keeping himself from fussing over his rather extravagant suit, and walked into her office, shutting the door firmly behind him. He beheld her, a creature the likes of which he had never seen. Her mixed signals threw his innate sense of order completely off; she regarded him with the interest of a python eyeing its next meal, and yet shifted prettily in her seat as though she meant to draw him in and give him pleasure; to have him trust her, if not for lust, but sheer conveyance of luxury (and with it, power). She knew what men below wanted from her. She didn't get to where she was without sharing herself a bit.

But, to her surprise, he didn't seem to fall for it. He cast his eyes downward, as though embarrassed by the length of her bare thigh peeking from around the side of her opulent desk. He let his pale, long-fingered hands fidget slightly, and eventually looked up to her underneath dark and sculpted brows.

They seemed matched, the two of them. Two wildcats fighting for prey. Unfortunately for Oswald, he himself was the prey she sought. He relented under her intense presence, as though trapped in a pressure cooker with no way out but into the mouth of a beast.

"Hello. You must be Oswald," she purred.

Something in Oswald suddenly shifted, a massive avalanche of conflicting emotions. He found himself liquefied emotionally and rationally, and the sudden desire to serve her, to make her happy with him, suddenly drowned out his previous thoughts and intentions, as though a light had been switched on in the dark to spook away the spiders and replace them with shadows.

"Yes, Miss Mooney," he responded, trying to keep his voice from shaking. "I am."


End file.
